Mitt to America: Let’s go serfin’ now

Posted on April 3, 2012 by oddmanout215

You may have noticed that the American political system as it currently exists is helping reduce many of us to the status of serfs in a feudal system. Or, if you’d rather, into what sociologists Kevin Leicht and Scott Fitzgerald call “postindustrial peasants,” in debt up to our ears, from young adulthood to the grave.

The media remain oblivious to this reality except for a few dependably progressive outlets.

ThinkProgress noted today that Mitt Romney is the favorite GOP candidate of Goldman Sachs and the rest of the financial industy — big surprise, right? — and that many misleading TV ads for Mitt are from a Super PAC called Restore Our Future, which receives almost half its funding from the financial industry:

Of the $43.2 million raised by the attack PAC, $20.5 million, or 48 percent, came from finance industry donors, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by the Center for Public Integrity.

At least $13.5 million came from private equity firms ($7 million) and hedge funds ($6.5 million) while most of the rest came from investment banks and other asset managers. So-called “non-bank lenders” that run storefront cash-for-title and payday lending operations gave the super PAC $437,500, according to the analysis.

Who would have dreamed in 1962, when “Surfin’ Safari” was released, that America would one day be openly run by high-stakes gamblers and extortionists? That an emotionally stunted, compulsively lying, super-wealthy jobs destroyer — “Corporations are people, my friend” — would be a major-party candidate for president? That a significant portion of the political establishment would by openly hostile to the interests of the working class?

The takeaway from the ThinkProgress item is there’s no hope of restoring even a vestige of government for the people until we bar the rich from funding, and more-or-less anointing, candidates for high office. Which means, first of all, that Congress must scuttle the reactionary Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Which means we must back only those candidates who vow to pursue this goal.

Politicians can’t even get nominated without selling out to the rich, but once in office they sometimes can be scared into doing the right thing.

OK, that’s a fairly lame declaration, but I’m trying to cultivate a positive attitude.

Posted in campaign finance reform, Congress, economic collapse, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Arianna won’t have to share the jackpot

Posted on April 2, 2012 by oddmanout215

Some bloggers are half-crazy, probably from spending too much time alone. Picture those poor fools who thought Arianna Huffington would compensate them for having worked for nothing to help make her another fortune. From Raw Story:

Bloggers hoping to put themselves on a more robust financial footing and close the gap between them and fully paid journalists are vowing to fight on after a New York court dismissed their multi-million-dollar lawsuit against the Huffington Post calling for compensation for exploitation of its army of unpaid commentators.

The ruling, slipped out relatively unnoticed at the end of last week, dismisses the argument made by a group of bloggers that their unremunerated contributions had provided a substantial part of the value of the Huffington Post and that they should therefore be entitled to some of the spoils of the site’s sale to AOL for $315m. The bloggers demanded a third of the sale price, $105m, in compensation…

The lawsuit was launched last April by a labour activist and writer, Jonathan Tasini, who posted more than 200 unpaid columns for the HuffPo before the AOL deal went through. He framed the suit as a class action on behalf of an estimated 9,000 bloggers for the website…

Arianna was an outspoken right-winger while married to right-wing billionaire Michael Huffington, but “her politics later moved to the left,” as the Guardian put it. She campaigned unsuccessfully to become governor of California in 2003, and started HuffPo with a partner in 2005.

I’m imagining her wearing a bemused expression, doing her very best Zsa Zsa imitation upon hearing those humble scribes wanted to get paid. “But darlink, don’t they know there is little money to be made writing for the Internet unless you are a celebrity?”

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, unemployment | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

An April Fools’ Day song

Posted on April 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

I’ve seen the bright lights of Memphis and the Commodore Hotel/And underneath a street lamp I met a Southern belle/ Well, she took me to the river where she cast her spell/And in that southern moonlight she sang the song so well

If you’ll be my Dixie Chicken, I’ll be your Tennessee Lamb/And we can walk together down in Dixieland…

Little Feat specialized in California-style New Orleans funk, and I mean that in a good way. These guys could play. “Dixie Chicken,” a short story in verse form, is by Lowell George, the heart of the band, a singer/slide guitarist who died way too young. Check out the guest stars on this live version.

Posted in arts, pop music, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Big media help push big tax lie

Posted on April 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

Sen. Orrin Hatch thinks it's OK to lie by omission

Why do Republican politicians boldly tell lies that could easily be refuted by the mainstream media? Easy answer — the media’s “he said, she said” approach to reporting encourages the pols to keep lying.

One of the GOP’s most frequently uttered lies is that corporations in the U.S. are taxed at an outrageously high rate. Here’s Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah: “This isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke; as of April 1, the United States of America will have reached the inauspicious position of having the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.”

In fact, most Republican pols tell the same lie, which they use to help support the even bigger lie that high taxes discourage corporations from engaging in more “job creation.” And the big media outlets — New York Times, Washington Post, TV network news departments, and so on — rarely call them on their lies.

To read the truth, you have to ignore the media dinosaurs and use an internet site such as ThinkProgress:

…. As we’ve noted time and time again, while the U.S. has a high statutory corporate tax rate (meaning the rate on paper), U.S. corporations actually pay incredibly low taxes due to the ever-proliferating loopholes, credits, and deductions in the tax code and the use of overseas tax havens.

U.S. corporate taxes that were actually paid (the effective rate) fell to a 40 year low of 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2011, despite corporate profits rebounding to their pre-Great Recession heights. The U.S. both taxes its corporations less and raises less in revenue from corporate taxes than its foreign competitors…

The ThinkProgress article isn’t left-wing spin, it’s fact. Unfortunately, fact often carries no more weight in mainstream reportage than lies. It’s easier to report Orrin’s statement than to explain that effective rates of taxation — Verizon’s is 2.7 percent! — so that’s how the MSM plays it. If media outlets do explain the difference between statutory and effective rates, the explanation is usually buried deep in the story instead of at the top, where it belongs.

Posted in globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, taxes, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Scalia — joker with a mean streak

Posted on March 30, 2012 by oddmanout215

Paul Krugman wrote a good column yesterday about Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court’s chief buffoon, but a reader’s response to the column was even better:

When Justice Scalia compared requiring health insurance to requiring people to buy broccoli, something in me snapped. I think what snapped is the basic faith in our government that I have held onto for decades. My wife and I are both cancer survivors and have lived through being denied health insurance, facing a choice between destitution and death.

To take our suffering, and that of millions of others so casually, so dismissively. as Justice Scalia did in his broccoli comment, is an act of moral degeneracy. Clearly major portions of our government care not the slightest for the well-being of the citizenry.

I didn’t snap when I read Scalia’s remarks, but I did feel a moment of clarity. I remembered that Scalia, despite all his legal training, reasons crudely, without factoring in empathy or compassion. He laughs at the misfortune of the poor because he convinced himself long ago that poor people deserve misfortune.

Scalia feels contempt for the sort of social contract envisioned by certain Enlightenment thinkers and gradually implemented by progressive-minded Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s no exaggeration to say he’d feel more at home in the antebellum South than in America after the New Deal. I’m sure he’d tell great slave jokes.

Regardless of how the Court rules on the health care law, you can be sure Scalia cares nothing about how his rulings affect “the well-being of the citizenry.” That’s why Ronald Reagan appointed him.

Posted in Great Depression, Great Recession, history | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

‘Across 110th Street’

Posted on March 30, 2012 by oddmanout215

Bobby Womack’s song, playing over the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. And that’s Pam Grier, of course, not little surfer girl Bridget Fonda. You got to be strong if you wanna survive…

Better start eating my spinach, it’s been a rough year.

Posted in arts, movies, pop music | Leave a comment

Mitt jokes about lost jobs

Posted on March 29, 2012 by oddmanout215

My dad laid everybody off, you get it? Hahaha!

You don’t have to be a natural-born entertainer to win a major election, but you do have to be a fairly good liar. You have to know your audiences reasonably well, and tell them what they want to hear. That’s what makes Mitt Romney so special. Even when he tries to sound like an average Joe, he ends up reminding listeners that he’s the guy who puts the average Joes out of work.

From NYT:

Mitt Romney opened a “tele-town hall” with Wisconsin voters on Wednesday afternoon with what he described as a “humorous” story highlighting his connections to the state. But not everyone found the story, about his father closing a Michigan factory, quite so funny.

“You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors and they made Ramblers and Jeeps, and they had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wis., and another one in Milwaukee, Wis.,” Mr. Romney began. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.”

Haha! What then?

“And I recall at one parade where he was going down the street, he was led by a band — they had a high school band that was leading each of the candidates — and his band did not know how to play the Michigan fight song, it only knew how to play the Wisconsin fight song. So every time they would start playing ‘On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin.”

Haha, that’s a good one! What’s funny is that Mitt always forgets he’s not at the private club with his private-equity pirate friends. He can’t resist indirectly reminding voters about his years at Bain Capital, where his specialty wasn’t moving production plants and jobs but rather destroying them.

Which reminds me, did you hear the one about Mitt saying he doesn’t approve of health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, Mitt Romney, New York Times | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Supreme buffoon serves up broccoli

Posted on March 28, 2012 by oddmanout215

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the Obama administration’s lawyer, didn’t do himself any good yesterday when he argued that health care is no more than a product on the market that everyone must eventually buy. This left the door open for Justice Antonin Scalia to make a buffoonish analogy:

Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.

Verrilli tried to explain why the health care market is different from the food market, but he didn’t do a good job. So Scalia interrupted again and asked if there is a “principled basis” for distinguishing the health care market from any other market.

Verrilli, apparently intimidated by the buffoon, continued to flounder until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg jumped in to save his ass:

Mr. Verrilli, I thought that your main point is that, unlike food or any other market, when you made the choice not to buy insurance, even though you have every intent in the world to self-insure, to save for it, when disaster strikes, you may not have the money. And the tangible result of it is — we were told there was one brief that Maryland Hospital Care bills 7 percent more because of these uncompensated costs, that families pay a thousand dollars more than they would if there were no uncompensated costs. I thought what was unique about this is it’s not my choice whether I want to buy a product to keep me healthy, but the cost that I am forcing on other people if I don’t buy the product sooner rather than later.

If Barack Obama’s health care law is overturned, it might be because he decided our health care options should be limited to the realm of commerce on the “free market” — i.e., to the for-profit insurance companies that have been ripping us off for decades. Obama should have pushed from the beginning for universal health care as a human right, or an essential component of the social contract, not as a product we must buy. (Same old question for Obama: Why did you quit on single payer and then the public option, without a fight?)

The administration isn’t likely to win an argument about the market with a squad of reactionaries — Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Alito — and a so-called moderate (Kennedy) who often takes sides with the reactionaries.

Footnote: In case you aren’t already alarmed by this case, Michael Kinsley noted Tuesday that the reactionary members of the Supreme Court might be aiming to derail “the use of federal power under the Commerce Clause, which gives the federal government the authority to ‘regulate commerce.’ Even the 1964 Civil Rights Act is considered constitutional as a regulation of commerce.”

Posted in health care, humor, Occupy Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Dear NYT: Why no news stories about ALEC?

Posted on March 27, 2012 by oddmanout215

[From a recent conversation with my Russian friend Sergei. We like to argue about which country is less democratic — America, or Putin’s Russia.]

No, Sergei, I’m not turning into a conspiracy theorist, and I’m not having one of my mood swings. There really is a secretive organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), financed by huge corporations and billionaires, that is helping to bust unions, kill health care reform and environmental regulations, make it harder for Democrats to vote, eliminate government aid to the poor, privatize prisons, and pass “stand your ground” laws like the one that, so far, has kept Trayvon Martin’s killer from being arrested.

ALEC really has bought many if not most of the Republicans in state legislatures around the country and, I swear to God, it actually writes the legislation that these stooges pass into law. Almost two thousand of ALEC’s members are state legislators!

ALEC wrote 50 bills, practically word-for-word, for right-wing legislators in Virginia alone. Recently, in Tennessee, it wrote a bill ordering schools to tell students that climate science is merely a “theory.” (Forget that the polar ice caps are melting!)

No, Sergei, I did not drink too much Stoli. The corrupt morons in our state legislatures are outsourcing important work to corporate interests — to the same people who funded their election campaigns.

Don’t light that stinking cigar, Sergei, and don’t tell me how bad things are in Russia. America is pretty damn close to Russia when it comes to the gap between rich and poor, and when it comes to government serving the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.

No, I can’t say for sure why our media — aside from a few online publications and moderately leftist print publications such as the Nation — have reported almost nothing about ALEC. There was this, from a recent New York Times editorial:

…Lawmakers who eagerly do ALEC’s bidding have much to answer for. Voters have a right to know whether the representatives they elect are actually writing the laws, or whether the job has been outsourced to big corporate interests.

Yes, voters have a right to know. So where are the news stories about the legislators who are ALEC’s puppets? Where is the multi-page Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative piece detailing the growth of this ultra-right-wing organization? Why is ALEC only mentioned out of nowhere in an editorial, or in a column by Paul Krugman?

I’m having a mood swing. Pass me the Stoli.

Posted in climate change, mainstream media, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

A heart for Cheney. Next, a brain for Bush.

Posted on March 25, 2012 by oddmanout215

New lease on life for renowned humanitarian

From CNN:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was recovering Saturday evening after undergoing heart transplant surgery, his office said. Cheney, 71, had surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia. He had been on the cardiac transplant list for more than 20 months, a statement from his office said. “Although the former vice president and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift,” it said.

I’m sure Cheney’s new heart goes out to the donor. The former VP is famous for random acts of kindness and, in general, for the almost boundless love of humanity he demonstrated while making foreign policy throughout his distinguished career.

News of the transplant surely will generate millions of prayers and good wishes from the Middle East, especially from Iraq, where Cheney helped make possible the killing or maiming of hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise have had to live out their lives under an oppressive regime.

Rumor has it that the new heart was a gift from the Emerald City — not the one in Iraq, but rather the legendary home of the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain who was the model for Cheney’s style of wielding power.

Regardless of where it came from, the heart couldn’t have gone to a more deserving recipient. We will probably never know how many organs became available for transplant because of deaths resulting from those Cheney-approved interrogation techniques that did so much to help foreigners understand American exceptionalism.

I don’t know how you feel, but the transplant news does wonders for my faith in karma and justice. I’m confident it will re-affirm the belief of good Christians everywhere that God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

Posted in humor, Iraq war, mainstream media | Tagged , , | 2 Comments